For millennia, the darkest doorways on the spookiest of nights have been haunted by one figure: woman. Whether in the form of a fanged and cloaked vampire, a clawed fury, or a baby-slaying witch, wicked women have frightened and titillated us in equal measure. Eleanor Johnson’s provocative new book, Monstrous Bitch, follows these demonic archetypes through more than 4,000 years of human history to identify their source: the demoness Lamashtu of ancient Mesopotamia. Wearing different guises, she appears in the plays of Euripides and in the Bible, the manuals of witch-hunters and the poems of Keats, Freudian texts and Hollywood films—always loudmouthed, hypersexual, and infanticidal. Johnson's history finds in the figure of the Monstrous Bitch both a tool of the patriarchy and an agitator who contests its power, especially when she takes to the silver screen.
Eleanor Johnson is professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. Her books include Scream with Me: Horror Films and the Rise of American Feminism (1968–1980) along with a number of scholarly monographs about the Middle Ages.
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